A couple weeks ago in The Guardian, Ellie Mae O’Hagan very thoughtfully bewailed the mainstream media’s treatment of anarchists. “The problem with the contemporary media narrative on protest,” she said, “is that, in its refusal to understand the nuances of anarchism, it is using the term as a euphemism for ‘dangerous’, ‘violent’ or ‘bad’.”

O’Hagan couldn’t be more right, and while she has no trouble recognizing that anarchism is a “broad-based political philosophy,” she points out that the media at large is intent on using it as a proxy for vandalism and destruction. The smearing of anarchism, she argues, is approaching the level of McCarthyism, with spurious, “Orwellian charges” becoming more and more frequent in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

The anti-anarchist, police state phenomena highlighted by O’Hagan cry out for anarchists to instruct society in our creed, not to explain it away in a way that compromises its radical message, but to convey what it really is. And that, as O’Hagan correctly notes, is a tradition of thought that “accommodates people of significantly contrasting viewpoints.” Arbitrary violence and destruction of property are about as much (or rather as little) a part of anarchism as they are of any other political persuasion.

Governments enjoy playing up “propaganda of the deed” as necessarily a feature of anarchism; it allows them to turn around and use the phrase “known anarchist” in the headlines when they throw people in a cage on trumped up charges. Random, warrantless police raids are far more palatable to a public that has been suckled on the lie that anarchists are thoughtless agents of chaos.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first to explicitly style himself an anarchist, did not choose the word out of a desire to promote chaos or disorder. Indeed, Proudhon identified himself as “a firm friend of order” and saw anarchy as expressing the “highest limit of liberty and order to which humanity can attain.” Through the history of anarchist thought, its proponents have taken great care to emphasize the differences between the kind of order offered by the state and that by free and voluntary society.

The former, they argued, was no order at all, but a war executed by a small elite against its own subjects, an abrogation of the natural, social order that would obtain in the state’s absence. Quite contrary to championing disorder or some kind of lawless mayhem, Proudhon imagined the coercive apparatuses of the state “dissolved” within a true market, with “political functions … reduced to industrial functions.”

In a very real way, it is the state that substitutes the chaotic and the violent for what is otherwise innate in the value-for-value trades between sovereign people. Government intrusions against, for example, a farm in the French village of Tarnac and a peaceful community action group in London demonstrate all too clearly that simply concerns about public safety is not the whole story.

In fact, it has been increasingly obvious that public safety is a mere subterfuge used to mask the state’s blatant attempts to discredit anything that might expose it for the band of criminals that it is. Since anarchism opposes hierarchy, authority and an economic system grounded in coercive privilege, it is eminently understandable that the state would want to bring its advocates into disrepute.

Against the rubric of senseless violence, however, anarchist couldn’t hope to approach the carnage rendered by the state. So when anarchists or other political dissidents are taken in for things like “suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.

If anarchists succeeded in replacing the state with voluntary, consensual institutions, it wouldn’t mean a perfect, crimeless utopia. What would surface, though, would be a society that could avail itself of all the latent potential now stamped out by the rigid, decaying force of statism; it would be a society without sanctioned coercion, without the ancient idea, absurd on its face, that society’s worst, most powerful criminals are to be revered and respected.

That the state is a moral abomination is easy enough to show and to understand. What is more difficult is communicating that message in a world rigged so that people can’t understand, so that disinformation becomes truth. That’s the state’s game, but, as they say, truth will out.

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A clear enunciation of a segment of primarily European Anarchist history and thought, with with I have no argument.

I would say, though, that the mistreatment of anarchism by the media did not start or reach its peak in the McCarthy era, but much earlier in the Hearst era. The industrial media is in the service of industrialists, as always.

I would also note that the non-nuanced attacks on anarchism seem to be directed at the European brand and its followers of Proudhoun, Goldman/Berkman, Jonathan Most, the Haymarket martys, etc. The American strand of 'natural' anarchists, primarily Henry David Thoreau and his modern advocate and some would say successor, John Cage, are pretty much ignored. Some might say that is because this American 'artsy' movement is not politically effective or challenging to the state. I would disagree, and claim that the actual influence of Thoreau, Cage and Ginsberg, to name just three, have had a more profound and lasting impact ~as anarchists~ on American society than those of the so-called 'direct-action' advocates.

Lastly, to say that "the state is a moral abomination" is to speak in nonsense, or baby-talk. The state has no place at all in the realm of morality. Clearly, the state is not, and does not claim to be bound by the same strictures of morality that have evolved for individual humans in response to their need to live in large communities. The behavioral code for organizations is different than the behavioral code for individuals. We do not apply the moral code for humans to the actions of a pack of wild dogs. They simply do not apply. If we were to do so, we would say the actions of a pack of wild dogs is abominable. For the lion to attack the lamb is abominable. We must acknowledge that, at least for the current era, we must render unto Caesar's State that which is Caesar's. It has nothing to do with that which is moral.
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The word "anarchist" is, by itself, one of the strongest weapons that Statists have against voluntaryists. I don't believe I have EVER seen a positive use of the term in the mainstream media, and even when used in libertarian discourse the term "anarchy" is often used in a negative sense — it denotes violence, chaos, violation of rights, and so on.

Why are we still using this word? We can keep telling people how WE define the word — which hasn't worked well for over a hundred years — OR we can use a word that doesn't have the scary, negative connotations that 99% of the population hears in the word "anarchy."

Voluntaryism — it's a great word, denotes peace and non-coercion, non-aggression, has no negative connotations that I'm aware of.

Abolitionism — another great word, the one I typically use myself; it has very POSITIVE associations for most people and accurately describes the movement to abolish something, in this case aggression. An abolitionist is simply extending (trying to finish) the abolition of slavery begun in 1865 when we freed the slaves in the South.

Glen, Thanks a lot for your post. Quite honestly, I still do and have for many years considered and reconsidered the question about the word “anarchist” myself. Daily, without exception, I have to confront the negative connotations that accompany the word. Nonetheless, I’m not yet ready to jettison the history that also attends the word, an important history of ideas that we draw from as voluntaryists. But you raise an important question, and one that happens to be asked of me by a close family member very, very frequently! Thanks again!

"Anarchist" is no more a "weapon" for Statists then "Statist" is a weapon for anarchists. What is more, the "popular" description of anarchism is irrelevant; in the Deep South, it is popular to believe that evolution is the work of Satan, but it'd hardly be sensible to go around calling it anything else just to appeal to some other persons uninformed cultural values. What is more, your selection of "libertarian" discourse is obviously narrow and chosen to suit your point, considering that a good variety of libertarian writers have not shirked from the dirty word "anarchism" when articulating their viewpoints.

What is more, the image of the anarchist movement by the larger public is a surface ignorance, and the use of the word itself is irrelevant if it has "worked" or not– again, this could be applied to any subject matter in which most people don't know the qualifying facts and concepts that make up the idea. Few people care enough to know about anarchism beyond a surface "understanding" that they were force fed, so to say that it hasn't "worked" is only true if we accept that we are powerless in the face of the State to change minds– and it should be obvious where that sort of thinking will lead us.

Finally, Voluntaryism has plenty of its own problems on a normative level that reduce it to sheer relativist nonsense. For one, Voluntaryism has the problem of smuggling in norms that are not universally accepted, and frames all discussion in an unstated, unagreed upon set of ethical and property norms. This isn't of course to suggest that a problem lies within the premise of voluntary association, but rather, 1.) the associated concepts that go unstated and 2.) that the "voluntary"-ness of an action is treated as being without context.